Rachel Starr Thomson

Another article is up on Boundless today, this one sharing my response to the recession — and more importantly, God’s response to me!

You can read Work, For I Am With You at this link.

Have you ever heard the saying that everyone has at least one book inside of them? The more involved I get with the writing and publishing industries, the more amazed I am at the sheer numbers of people who want to write — not to mention the sheer numbers of people who do. But perhaps the most amazing thing is how different our stories can be.

As I work on The Advent, one thing I’m continually asking myself is what story I really want to tell this time around. What aspects of life do I want to explore? What characters do I want to delve? What themes are beating in my heart that want to get out on paper? I’m feeling my way through some of those things right now, and at the same time I’m editing stories, both fiction and non, for people who have entirely different stories to tell.

In the last year I’ve edited books about scientists who travel back in time to explore the Antediluvian world; tales of adventure, slavery, old mines, and sword fights; the Mayflower Pilgrims and their relevance to our lives today; adoption disruption; dangerous addictions. I’ve reviewed books about forest worlds, pirates, genetic manipulation, and death. Currently I’m reading books about literary criticism, true love, and the life of a missionary. Every manuscript is unique. Every one tells a different story.

What’s your story? If you could tell any story right now (and tell it well — if you’re like me, you may be avoiding telling certain stories right now because you want to develop your skills enough to do them justice), what would it be?

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Recently I pitched an idea for an article to Boundless: I wanted to write about Amy Carmichael, a missionary woman who sailed to India in 1895 and stayed there until her death in 1951. I didn’t want to write about her as a missionary but as a writer; in her lifetime Amy wrote some 37 books, and in my opinion her work doesn’t get nearly enough attention.

I discovered Amy’s writing through a little anthology (it’s a good thing it’s thin, as Amy didn’t like thick books; she told her publisher they looked “stodgy”) called Learning of God. It had a huge impact on my spiritual life, but also on my writing life, as it turns out. Amy’s style is natural and flowing and steeped in scripture; it’s funny and salty and mystical. All things I’d like my own writing to be.

Today I finished drafting that article, tentatively titled “Fire-Words,” and I really look forward to introducing more people to this aspect of Amy’s legacy.

Question for you today: are there any little-known authors who’ve impacted you? Authors you’d like to introduce others to? Or even well-known authors who are falling out of favour in this age of twenty-second attention spans and shock value?

The good news: The current manuscript of The Advent has a prologue and two chapters, about 35 pages in all. Considering that last week it had nothing, that’s not bad. Some of it is recycled material from the old version, much of it is new.

The bad news: I’m still floundering for a plot — but even this is looking up. Yesterday I went out driving with some friends, just sitting in the back seat of the minivan reading a book on writing about literature (written for college lit students) while they drove around the city for two hours, and all that reading and thinking and riding did me some good. I wrote an outline for an article I’ve been hopeless on and I also thought through some of The Advent’s themes and characters in greater depth. That, combined with inspiration that struck in the shower three days ago, is moving me toward an actual story rather than just a bunch of characters splashing around aimlessly in a sea of words.

I’m dreading the day (probably next week) when I have to go back over these first chapters and shape them into something more coherent, but I’m excited about the possibilities.

Thanks for reading! I’ll be back next week. Until then, have a wonderful weekend!

The position I find myself in is one of watching my friends face into futures that are taking shape, with comforting lines and seemingly predictable challenges, while my own future still looks like an open horizon at sea. Light and darkness in a sky that goes on forever.

Often I feel like a capable captain aboard my little ship, but other times I sit down very small and swallow a lump in my throat as I face out at that big, big world. The waves lapping at my boat are the only sound.

Still, as unsteady as my footing can feel, being out at sea is an adventure with a lot to teach me. So what am I learning out here on my little ship?

“Thoughts from the Ship of Singleness,” my latest article, is up on Boundless.org. Suzanne Hadley was kind enough to post about it on Boundless Line, so you can also read her thoughts and some general discussion on the topic of singleness here.

Thanks to the generosity of Bethany House, Karen Hancock’s publisher, I have a free copy of The Enclave to give away. Since random drawings of commenters’ names strike me as uninteresting, you actually have to do something to win this one .

First, read my Day 3 post “Men, God, and Men Like Gods,” where I argue that the Great Irony of mankind is that the more we try to become like God, the more we become something entirely unlike Him, while the more we accept our limitations and cry out for grace, the more truly we are transformed into His image.

Leave a comment on THAT POST (not this one) naming another story which you feel illustrates this Great Irony. (This story might be a book, a short story, a play, a movie, whatever — even nonfiction is fair game, since this Great Irony isn’t fictional.) Give a bit of detail about it — in what characters or circumstances do you most see this irony playing out?

Have fun . You have until Wednesday, July 29, to leave your comment and be eligible to win the book.

And the serpent said unto the woman, Ye shall not surely die: for God doth know that in the day ye eat thereof, then your eyes shall be opened, and ye shall be as gods, knowing good and evil. (Genesis 3:4-5)

Karen Hancock’s The Enclave is set at an institution that’s high-tech and groundbreaking, modern in every sense of the word except cynicism, for the Kendall-Jakes Longevity Institute isn’t a cynical place. It’s a place where men are using science to create a new world, to reinvent themselves, to defeat mortality and make men into gods.

But the roots of what’s happening at K-J go all the way back to Genesis. From the moment Parker Swain, a villain who reminded me of Left Behind’s Nicolae Carpathia (but more interesting), opens his mouth, we know he’s not content to be human the way most of us are. Swain may have weaknesses, but he will overcome them; he is smarter, more daring, more godlike than ordinary men. Ordinary men like his father, who was a pastor.

“He was a fool,” Swain said now, hanging the cloth on its hook. “Did not read — except the Bible, of course. Did not think! Heaven forbid he should ever seriously and thoughtfully entertain a concept that challenged his belief system! He had no interest in developing his brain. My mother was even worse. Anything they didn’t understand — which was almost everything — they ascribed to the devil.”

And the devil, in Swain’s view, was nothing but a construct of Christianity. A nonexistant bogeyman used by one group of men to control another — which was the true purpose of all religions as far as Swain was concerned.

Free of God, free of the devil, free of anyone’s control, Swain will bring his own kingdom come, his own will be done. He does have one weakness, of course; he’s mortal. But through science, he plans to change that too.

In stark contrast, Lacey McHenry has fought her way up from a broken past to a position in the K-J animal lab, where she wears a lab coat with the name “Carlos” stitched on the pocket, battles stress and fatigue, and wishes desperately she could fit in. Her eventual ally, Cameron Reinhardt, is a post-traumatic geneticist who may be more intelligent than the average man but has as many clay feet as a mud-caked centipede.

Her fellow staff members had made it very clear that she was junior staff — welcomed warmly, but hardly fit to kiss the feet of the exalted priests and priestesses of research who were the heart and soul of Kendall-Jakes, the brilliant men and women who would usher in a new age for mankind. Men like Cameron Reinhardt, who couldn’t get his socks matched, rarely cleaned his glasses, forgot to shave more than half the time, and couldn’t even remember to close the lid on the frog tank.

And that, her conscience informed her, sounds very much like bitterness.

In The Enclave, a woman who vacillates between wanting the truth and just wanting to live for herself teams up with a man whose first reaction to evil is to run away and change his name. On their side, they have God — the Creator spoken of in Genesis, toward whom they are both a little bitter for getting them into such a mess, but whom they have no choice but to trust. On the opposite side is a man who has never accepted that he is not God, that he cannot be God, that after all, eating of the knowledge of evil is not enough to transform him.

It was in this look at the human heart, of the ways we respond to a God who is greater than we are, that I felt The Enclave became most significant. In many ways, all of human history is a refusal on the part of man to admit that he is man and that God is God. Those who admit to being what they are, fallen, fallible, and helpless, can be saved. Those who do not are unreachable by grace.

In the real world, science has long been one of the primary battlefields where these truths play out. In fact, Karen Hancock says that a real-life experiment in the 1980s provided the inspiration for Kendall-Jakes’s dirty little secret, an underground enclave where science has gone too far. Hancock tackles many of the ways in which man tries to be God, from cloning to manipulation to self-glorification, and she does it with the stamp of truth.

In the end, the great irony is that in trying to become God, we reveal how much we have misunderstood Him. When God became man in the person of Christ, He was a perfect man. When man tries to become God, he becomes a monster. He becomes more intolerant, more controlling, more cruel than any man-made pagan god of the past. He becomes Parker Swain, who is everything he claims to hate.

And all the while, those human beings who accept their limitations, who carry thorns in their flesh and cry out for grace, who cast themselves on God’s will, help, and love — these become, little by little, more like God.

Thanks to Karen Hancock for writing a novel that highlights our great irony — and God’s great grace — so clearly.

The Kendall-Jakes Longevity Institute is a literal monument to science, creativity, and the ability of man to rise above his limitations: a black glass ziggurat in the Arizona desert, labs and conference rooms interspersed with rainforest atriums, coffee bars, and incredible views. True, the Institute’s director, the globe-trotting, womanizing Parker Swain, once fell out of favour with the world for his daring experiments — but that only makes his hard-fought triumphs more admirable.

Working at Kendall-Jakes means prestige, the chance to work on the cutting edge of genetics, funding, community.

Or at least, it’s supposed to. For Lacey McHenry, newly arrived with a Masters, more debt than she can handle, and a gut-level need to transcend the disappointments of life thus far, Kendall-Jakes has meant three weeks of tending frog tanks, cleaning up after absent-minded geneticist Cameron Reinhardt, and foregoing sleep.

Stressed and unhappy, Lacey is unprepared to encounter a stinking, musclebound young thug in the animal lab, a violent and deranged intruder who has somehow slipped past KJ’s infamous security. Saved by the arrival of Reinhardt, Lacey is even more unprepared to be labeled a case for the psych ward, to have her story turned into a “hallucination” and the deep cut on her arm turned overnight into a scar. Nothing at KJ is what it seems, not even her own life.

Cameron Reinhardt is similarly unprepared for the encounter, one that triggers his struggles with Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder and threatens to unearth memories he’s spent years burying. A devout Christian, Cam is appalled at the Institute’s treatment of Lacey and is forced to admit that his dream of research and freedom at Kendall-Jakes is a nightmare he’s not sure he can escape.

For the Institute’s secrets are ancient, everywhere underfoot, deadly — and determined to ensnare Cam and Lacey completely.

The Enclave is a scientific thriller along the lines of Michael Crichton, a throat-grabbing story that spans centuries and chronicles man’s efforts to become God even while trying to escape Him. Its characters, from the megalomaniac Swain, whose dreams are nonetheless poignant, to the convincingly torn Cameron Reinhardt, are entirely human. Plot twists and mysteries aside, I read this book to find out what would happen to the characters. They mattered. Their struggles with faith and integrity and hope resounded with me.

Even God, who reaches into the lives of several characters and interacts with them, is portrayed faithfully — when He speaks, the dialogue uses the words of scripture; when He acts, it’s in ways consistent with the God revealed in the Bible. The role of the Bible itself was especially moving, as the author shows its power to illuminate and give us hope.

The Enclave is well-written, intelligent, intriguing. Violence and sexuality make it a PG-13 read. For discerning readers who enjoy thrills, speculation, and stories about people living by real faith, I recommend this one.

Tomorrow, revisit this blog for a chance to win a brand-new copy of The Enclave .

Books–stories themselves–come in so many shades and textures and ways.

Some books are lush, gorgeous, enriching.

Some are dense but necessary.

Some, like The Enclave by Karen Hancock, are just plain riveting.

It took me all of about two chapters to be sucked thoroughly into The Enclave, guessing at its mysteries, marveling at its setting, caring about its characters, strongly relating to the absent-minded Christian-out-of-water hero, and really not wanting to put it down.

There are probably several reasons for this. One is the setting — The Enclave takes place at a state-of-the-art scientific institution, a think-tank for brilliant scientists at the edge of all science can do. Before it was clear that I was going to be a writer, I loved the idea of becoming a scientist, so The Enclave sucked me in on that level. The one-punch-after-another, sock-’em-good-and-keep-’em-guessing plot and pacing helped too. But most of all, The Enclave pulled me in because I cared about its characters, especially Cameron Reinhardt, a brilliant Christian scientist whose faith is mocked and belittled by his collegues but who stays faithful anyway, who hides a secret past and is so convincingly absent-minded that I think Karen Hancock knows what it’s like to get up in the morning and put your shirt on inside-out.

Without characters who are so relatably human, The Enclave would still be exciting and fascinating, but it somehow wouldn’t matter so much.

With that thought, I leave you till tomorrow. In the meantime, check out Karen Hancock’s blog, where she’ll also be talking about The Enclave for the next few days, and her Web site.

You can also check out the rest of the tour bloggers at the links below.

Brandon Barr
Jennifer Bogart
Keanan Brand
Grace Bridges
Canadianladybug
Melissa Carswell
Valerie Comer
Amy Cruson
CSFF Blog Tour
Stacey Dale
D. G. D. Davidson
Janey DeMeo
Jeff Draper
Emmalyn Edwards
April Erwin
Karina Fabian
Beth Goddard
Todd Michael Greene
Heather R. Hunt
Becky Jesse
Cris Jesse
Jason Joyner
Julie
Carol Keen
Krystine Kercher
Dawn King
Mike Lynch
Melissa Meeks
Rebecca LuElla Miller
Mirtika
Eve Nielsen
Nissa
John W. Otte
Steve Rice
Crista Richey
James Somers
Speculative Faith
Stephanie
Rachel Starr Thomson
Steve Trower
Fred Warren
Elizabeth Williams